Wednesday, January 11, 2012

We Do Not Need the Establishment Media to Spread Paul's Message.

Ron Paul's second place showing in New Hampshire frightens the Establishment: Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank, the money center banks, and the the nexus of institutions that surround these, especially the legacy media from MS-NBC to Rush Limbaugh. According to The State Column Paul's popularity had surged five percent in a Reuters Poll prior to his win in New Hampshire. Now that he has come in second with better than 20 percent of the New Hampshire vote Paul's issues cannot be ignored. If the Establishment continues to play its ignore-and-defame game, Paul's movement will continue to grow. The end result will be the Fed's curtailment or abolition whether or not the Establishment is willing to debate him. We do not need the Establishment media to spread Paul's message.

Paul's movement will grow because numbers bestow credibility, and the pain that the Fed and Wall Street have inflicted on the average American is becoming increasingly evident over time. Our economic future is bleak; but our recent economic past is bleak too. Real wages have been stagnant for the past 40 years, a stagnation unknown prior to the abolition of the gold standard, the expansion of the Fed's money-creation powers, and the expansion of government regulation under the Great Society. The gold standard's abolition unshackled the Fed's power to destroy the American economy. The massive harm it had done in the 1940s and 1950s through the federal urban renewal program that decimated America's cities expanded into a series of massive stock market, real estate, and financial bubbles that dwarf all past eras' financial instability. The long term effects of the Progressive destruction of America's wealth will be felt for another century.

The most recent Fed-induced crisis began with the culmination of the long Reagan-initiated stock market bubble of the 1980s and 1990s, the short Bush real estate bubble of the early 2000s, and the collapse of European socialism in Greece, Spain and other southern European states, whose recent history is still another part of the sequence of Fed-induced bubbles.

Ron Paul's strong showing augurs well for the future of America because the alternative to a decentralization and libertarian reorganization of the American republic is fascism, that is, increasing stagnation, decline, and government suppression.

To put Paul's performance in perspective, recall how radical his platform is. He is calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank, and he has received more than 20 percent of the vote. Paul is a more radical candidate than the Communist Party's, and the Establishment would probably prefer a CP candidate to Paul. No major candidate has called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank in decades, possibly since the Fed was established in 1913. The Republicans who dominated the 1920s, especially Warren G. Harding and his vice president and successor Calvin Coolidge, did not question the Progressive institutions that Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, had forged on behalf of Wall Street.

Until now, the media has been able to marginalize the few who have raised the gold standard and the Fed as issues. But the Internet has increasingly made the legacy media obsolete, and the argument against the Fed is powerful. Few institutions in world history have caused so much harm as has the Federal Reserve Bank. The academic and Establishment ideologues who defend the Fed do not have historical evidence or palpable economic outcomes on their side. The Fed has gradually destroyed the American dream. Today, American industry is a pathetic shell of its former self, and its banking and business leaders empty-headed cuckoos who depend on public welfare and are unable to refrain from common criminality--witness the recent Corzine scandal.

Until this year, the Establishment has been successful at preventing large scale discussion about the Federal Reserve Bank. Even now, the legacy media attempts to deflect discussion of Paul's chief issue by calling him names and raising difficult-to-explain positions like his opposition to federal laws like the Civil Rights Act. It is difficult for Paul to explain complex positions to bubble-brained television announcers and to overcome a legacy media drumbeat of lies, such as Gary Weiss's recent syndicated column.

I am getting back into gold soon. But the instability, decline, income inequality, and large scale business criminality that directly results from Progressivism is under direct threat, and this can only mean a reassessment of the wealth-reallocation machine that makes holding gold desirable. The Establishment is likely fearful, but it will have to engage Paul or cope with an ever more radical response.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.